


Sleepwalker

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: Firefall Series - Peter Watts
Genre: Human/Non-Human Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, Space Flight, Trick or Treat: Trick, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-04 08:18:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16343225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: Some miniscule segment of his DNA is donor-gifted, slipped subtly into his sequences like a knife between the ribs, the rest of him none the wiser. Like his now-dead crewmates, Siri is no longer fully Human.In his genes, through the stars, he carries Jukka Sarasti.





	Sleepwalker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



_Charybdis_ striates the cosmos like a meteor crossing a cold night sky; like a bullet tearing through skin. It does not veer or meander as it skirts gas giants and galaxies, leaving dust lanes in its wake. Radiation laps futile at its exterior, seeks pores in the external alloys.

That’s fine. They built it to survive most of the hazards out here.

Its pilot is another story.

Mostly, he sleeps. Though _hibernation_ is closer to the truth, and even that does not quite encompass the great feat of bio-engineering, the predator-sourced genes stolen and spliced, the Human body vacuumed dry of moisture like fruit in a dehydrator. Siri Keeton is not naturally capable of this deep, dream-stricken sleep. This slumber between stars. The skipping between the seconds, cheating time, passing through the space between. Siri Keeton alone cannot sleep and wake some five years later, unaged and parched like a desert scorpion.

But some miniscule segment of his DNA is donor-gifted, slipped subtly into his sequences like a knife between the ribs, the rest of him none the wiser. Like his now-dead crewmates, Siri is no longer fully Human.

In his genes, through the stars, he carries Jukka Sarasti.

*

_Time to wake up, Siri._

As bad as the waking was, he preferred it to the dreams.

 _Charybdis_ hummed gently around him. Low lights, just the bare minimum; the energy conserved to allow for gravity simulation, so that Siri could drag his corpse from the coffin and limp around his new domain, IV drips feeding moisture into drought-stricken innards. He was the mummified man. He staggered like a thing undead, clinging to the walls as his muscles groaned and only sometimes supported him.

It hurt like hell, and he was running low on painkillers.

Boredom never became an issue; he never stayed awake for long enough. He had his story to dictate. That alone occupied him. There was so much to say.

He might not survive the journey home. But something would; if nothing else, when a retrieval unit cracked _Charybdis_ open they would find Siri’s words, his own personal Dead Sea scrolls in auditory format, transcribed in binary on memory bank walls. They would know what he had seen and heard and translated. All his mistakes, laid bare.

Maybe they would feel contempt. They should; he had been given just one job, and that he had failed. His was not an impartial telling. He did not supply the bare, untainted facts.

His second job, though. That he meant to succeed at.

Even in death, Jukka Sarasti was very convincing.

*

In the sunken cave-like crevices of his dehydrated dream state, Siri watches shadows on the wall.

They vary at unpredictable intervals; he lifts a hand, and when the shadows are him he sees them wave in return. He recognises their movements and surfaces. They are him. Slower and drier than usual, but still himself, stripped bare of external artifice and the skins he wears to blend, in spaces where an absence of skin is liable to cause discomfort. He wears them as well as he can. Courtesies and scripted responses, reactions he has studied and learned, layered like layers of dermis he drapes about himself.

He sees them in his shadow. Not as subtle as he would have hoped, for all the decades of work he has put into making them. Here, his lies rise to his surface and expose him. He sees the cracks. The uneven stitches, the sour notes on the music sheet.

Was he ever convincing to anyone other than himself?

The shadows warp. Now his limbs lengthen, his torso is extended and made lean; now his shadow is built like a cheetah, speed ingrained in sinew. The mandible slightly overlong to allow for a mouthful of filed teeth. The eyes an odd gleam, colours like petroleum spilled over water. The threat so tangible his sedated brain stem quivers. The surfaces familiar.

God, he almost misses them.

But not quite.

*

Years into its journey, _Charybdis_ began receiving data. Nothing coherent at first; the corruption was too great, the distance causing static, gnawing at bytes like hungry fish at chum, degrading the long-outdated information. Still, it was something. Siri pored over it.

The sound of human voices made him twitchy, made him both exhilarated and unspeakably nervous. It kick-started subroutines he hadn’t used in nearly a decade. He began to process, to translate, to read the surfaces of garbled moods and intent and undercurrent; he sliced syntax apart like skin, and read the portents from the entrails underneath.

He knew, perhaps even before the speaker knew, that all was not well on Earth.

But there was nothing he could have done to help, even if the transmissions had not been nearly a decade old. And so he shut them down, detached his IV bags, and slowly shuffled back to his coffin to sleep the months away.

It was almost a decade exactly before the static smoothed out enough to unveil the messages underneath, and now Siri was sure he heard panic, when he heard anything at all. Deep space sailing, farewell announcements: ships going intentionally dark, far from home and travelling farther. ConSensus shut down. They must be doing their calculations on old-fashioned intranets, transmissions disabled. They were afraid to broadcast.

 _Good night and good luck_ , they said, and took a knife to their ships’ vocal tracts.

Their pursuers followed, quiet like undersea sharks, like leopards in the long grass, like an owl descending claws extended on a dormouse. They didn’t bother to hide their rare broadcasts; _Charybdis_ picked those up without trouble, cleaner and less scrambled than the Human cries for help. Wordless. Siri could no more translate them than he could follow an ant’s trail pheromones to the food source. It was beyond his capacity, synthetics and all. It was not for him to understand.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to. The chitinous, insectoid clicks, the silvery teeth-on-teeth taps, the glottal stops in slightly elongated throats; they stirred the underlayers of his half-brain, awakened slumbering prey-instinct. They terrified him speechless. They made him remember. They almost made him miss-

But not quite. Not after what Sarasti had done, the havoc he had wreaked in the tidy confines of Siri’s one remaining hemisphere; impartiality, objectivity, the perfect outsider perspective, the Synthesist’s tools taken out of their box and thrown about the room. Siri would never be able to clean up the mess. His walls were dented. His floor scratched apart. His ceiling gutted to let the night sky stream through, stars glistening in the gaps. Siri looked up at them. He had no choice.

 _Lately you improve_.

And the voice of self, the _him_ that spoke inside his head, that dictated his thoughts and read back the results of analysis, that told him how to act; that voice was changing, year by year. Once it had sounded like Siri.

Lately, it sounded like someone else entirely.

*

As hard as Siri tries, he cannot miss Jukka Sarasti. As often as his thoughts stray to the predator, the monster that tore him open and broke his tools and then _saved his life_ ; Siri cannot miss him. Empathy alone is not enough. Gratitude, resentment, hatred, they are not enough.

Whatever the missing piece, he doesn’t have it in him. Maybe he left it to burn, back on _Theseus_.

*

His father sent a message; fourteen years after escape, _Charybdis_ picked it up and decoded it, filtering static fuzz from a voice Siri had never thought to hear again. A true message in a bottle, a directionless broadcast tossed out into the great, dark empty, a hope without base. A beautiful thing. Even half-rehydrated, skin still dry as bark, Siri felt wetness on his cheeks.

So little meaning in the message itself; so much precious time wasted on sentiment, apologies, emotion and irrationality. Before he’d been broken, Siri would have found it garbled nonsense. Would have drained it dry of objective meaning and tossed the husk aside.

Now, though. Now it was everything, and he replayed it endlessly for days. It was not a gift he had ever expected to receive. Or be worthy of receiving. He could not decipher it, and still it had meaning.

_Siri Keeton, alone in the ether. Less than Human; less than anything else. But still valued. Still you mean so much that you’re given this, an impossible lifeline, to guide you home safe._

*

Back in his dreams (his room, his cave), Siri watches shadows. Like a cartographer, he charts surfaces and notes their familiar landmarks; there are many. His unconscious mind is too deeply drugged to create personalities. He knows his demons. They dance in two dimensions, grey on blank backdrop.

The scramblers form and unform, darting out of sight as he tries to focus on them, existing only at the corners of his vision. Many-legged, clones that pay him no attention, except to avoid him. They make his skin crawl. If he had the moisture left to sweat, he would wake sweat-soaked.

Helen is a frequent visitor; knowing her, she would want to know why her presence is not a constant. She hovers at his shoulder. She is as he saw her last in Heaven, stained glass shards clustering like a school of fish, the brightest of shadows. The smell of cinnamon. She comes and goes, though she never goes when Siri wants her to, which is always. She is as mute as the rest, but her surfaces speak of disappointment. Regret. Heavy, choking demands upon the boy she lost when the brain surgeons sewed his skull back up.

Siri’s father is a rarer shadow, and he is never not distant. It’s less strange that he doesn’t speak; he rarely spoke in life, either. Always a man of solid surfaces and watchful eyes, his hands clasped behind his back; his mouth moves, and from it Siri reads a message. Garbled, but still it moves him. He tries to understand. Tries not to hurt too much when his father’s shape falls apart in front of him.

Chelsea never shows. It’s probably better that way; Siri isn’t sure which version of her would paint itself on the walls of his subconscious. He isn’t sure what he would see, now that his tools are broken.

There is only ever one constant in his dreams. Eventually the shadows coalesce like iron filings to a magnet; they grow elongated and sharp, they grow eyes that gleam. Ever polite, ever coy, avoiding Siri’s gaze until he stops trying. Then they look at him. Then they meet his Human eyes and stare him down, and dare him to approach.

He gets a little closer every time.

*

_Wake up._

Clicking sounds, sharply arrhythmic; the broadcasts grew more frequent as the months passed. They seemed to come from all directions. But that itself was meaningless, just a sign that _Charybdis_ couldn’t decode the scrambling. It didn’t mean anything. No one knew where he was. No one was seeking him.

No one was following.

And yet, sometimes Siri thought of shadows, and found himself wondering…impossible things. Senseless things. He thought of _Scylla_ , sister to his own _Charybdis_ , left behind but still available, still an option if she’d been prepared as a backup. It was very possible he hadn’t seen her launch. She would only be minutes behind, shielded and muted, following in his wake. He wouldn’t know until he landed.

Maybe he wasn’t alone. Maybe he never had been.

It was impossible, of course. He had watched Sarasti die. Had been sent to safety by the machine that had worn the vampire’s body like a hand puppet, while the owner died in a bloody, twitching mess of torn brain matter, pulverised speech centres, and the clicks that were the closest he could get to communication.

He was dead. It was not him that Siri heard on the intercepted, eavesdropped messages. Those belonged to others. They couldn’t be him.

The broadcast sounds were sporadic, wavering in length and volume and frequency. Some were odd and unfamiliar; they froze his dehydrated spine, spawning ice crystals in his desiccated stomach. They were hunting sounds. He had never been more sure of anything.

Some were less strange. Less frequent, an impromptu staccato that woke his half-brain and set his fevered dream-stew alight. Siri heard them, and found himself back on _Theseus_.

_Like to hear a vampire folk tale?_

“No,” he mouthed to the machines that neither heard nor cared, and to the dead that would not let him sleep. “You’ve already told me that one. Don’t you have any others?”

_A laser is assigned to find the darkness._

“I know. There are no doors or windows in its room, but everywhere is bright, so it decides that darkness is a myth and doesn’t exist. And the moral of the story was that I project my own perceptions onto everything I record, and nothing I do is really objective. I _know_. I don’t even believe that’s a real folk tale. You’ve never met any other vampires. I doubt the lab that cracked your vat open ever bothered to teach you the folklore of an extinct species. You made it up.”

Silence in _Charybdis’_ unlit belly, its precious cargo sucked dry and stored away for safety. Siri waited. It was all he could do, these days.

Eventually, a response. Insectoid clicks; he froze with fear, and leaned towards the sound as best as he could. It was the one thing that still made sense to him. In all the universe, it was a point that did not waver. He imagined that he could almost make out its surfaces, blurred and yet familiar, like a silhouette projected on a blank cave wall. He convinced himself he was hearing irritation.

“I liked it though,” he mumbled. “It was a good analogy. Your first? It wasn’t bad at all.”

He dozed. Every now and then, a sound would jolt his dreams, sending storm clouds to turmoil his imaginary pastures and peace. Random, chitinous clicks, the _tap, tap, tap_ of filed teeth closing. They kept him from drifting deeper. They lifted him by the throat, shook him gently, dumped him back on _Theseus_.

_Eventually it concludes that there is no darkness. That light is everywhere._

The drugs seeped through his veins like sewage slipping into river water. He passed beyond the vampire’s grasp, and through the walls, drifting outward into the empty. Man overboard. The darkness rose over his head. Finally, he slept.

_Siri._

_Siri, pay attention._

_Are you listening?_

*

There is music in his dreams, these days. Not always; never when he asks for it, although he never does ask, so maybe he’s wrong about that. It’s an unpredictable thing, eerie and discordant, a directionless melody broken up by clicks that jolt him into attentiveness. He doesn’t know how to read it, how to find meaning in a tune he can’t follow. Sometimes it repeats notes, as if the singer has found a series of sounds that he likes, and wants to work it into something usable. He never quite manages it; he is not a skilled musician, it is clear.

Siri would suspect that the music is his own, that he creates it in the crevices of his mind and sneaks it into his subconscious. But those clicks are beyond him. He cannot create those. He would not, if he could.

The sounds continue over months, breaking up the usual broadcasts, the predator/prey performance that plays out among the stars, growing ever more frequent as _Charybdis_ approaches charted territory. Siri never grows accustomed to them. They are an unnatural, discordant thing, a susurration no Human was ever meant to hear, and they terrify him. They surround him. They keep the silences at bay, and after countless months he finally decodes their meaning.

_Like to hear a vampire lullaby?_

Someone is singing to him.

*

“Can you hear me?”  he sent to the uncompromising silence of space, _Charybdis_ broadcasting to the edge of its limited range. “Are you listening? Are you with me, or are you just me; are you the voice I hear in the vaults of my mind? Do you move between the wiring and synthetics, and sting what’s left of my brain matter? You capricious thing. You demon. You blood-hungry predator. Where are you? I’ve come so far, why won’t you leave me alone? I watched you die.”

The music faltered, and with it Siri’s heart.

He wondered why he had been afraid before. Now there was true silence and now, _now_ he was afraid.

“I…didn’t mean that,” he said, his voice dry and rough. Not at all like himself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Don’t go.”

The silence stretched in all directions, for days. Siri stayed awake. Ignored the increasingly pointed requests from _Charybdis’_ machinery, that wanted him safe in his coffin, his body dried and mummified, his mind cocooned and quiescent. He waited. He missed the music in a way he had never missed anything before. He missed it like an absent limb. Like…

But he didn’t have comparisons. He’d never cared enough for loss. He had lacked the capacity to notice. No one had told him it could be like this; that it could hurt so much he swore it was killing him.

Was it possible to die from an excess of _nobody_?

He never did find out. Eventually, the music started up again, strange and oddly lovely, utterly inhuman. It lulled him to the brink of sleep, and the drugs did the rest.

*

“Hypnosis,” he accuses the shadows. “Or some kind of mental imprint. Some…programming you installed, one of the times _Theseus_ was bringing me back from the dead. You got inside my head and uploaded something that doesn’t belong. You put yourself here. You…changed me while I was unconscious. Didn’t you?”

There is no response, and Siri isn’t expecting one. Shadows can’t talk. Not even ones with elongate limbs, coiled and curled on the wall in front of him, mimicking his cross-legged pose in a way that reads either playful or mocking. He can’t tell which. He doesn’t care.

“Why?” he asks. “Did you want to make sure I wouldn’t forget my instructions? As if I could. There’s nothing else to think about here. I’ll do my job. I don’t need supervision.”

The shadows stir, and memory stirs with them. Siri blinks. He is back on _Theseus_. Sarasti watches with eyes that gleam, and a close-lipped smile that hides his filed teeth from view. Soothe the prey with pleasantries. Siri knows his game. He hates how well it works.

“How did you do it?” he demands.

“Do what?”

“The music. The broadcasts, the…everything. I can _hear_ you, Jukka. In my head. Some of it’s memory, some’s trauma, and some of it is something else. But it’s not _real_. It can’t be. You died. So explain to me how I’m still hearing you.”

Sarasti shrugs. “Sounds like your problem, not mine.”

“Am I going crazy?”

“Maybe. Given the circumstances.”

“But you don’t want that,” Siri says. “You can’t want that, after all the work you put into _preconditioning_ me. How can I be your witness, your stenographer, if I’m insane at the other end? Why are you doing this?”

They watch each other. Or maybe Siri watches a memory. A figment. An echo. The lingering light from a star long since extinguished.

He would almost swear he sees sadness.

“I can’t help you, Siri,” Sarasti tells him gently. “As you say, I’m not real. We are not talking; you talk to yourself, and I am your avatar. I don’t know why. Do you?”

“I…no.”

“Let me know if you work it out.”

“I can’t do that,” Siri says. “Because you’re fucking dead. It doesn’t matter to you.”

“Matters to you, or we don’t have this conversation.”

Siri stares down the predator. It should be easier, here in the confines of his mind, where the white walls and low red lighting are just illusory fragments, poor reimaginings of the real thing. He is not on _Theseus_ , because _Theseus_ now only exists in particle form, scattered to the solar winds. He is not talking to Jukka Sarasti. He’s not sure he ever _did_ talk to Jukka Sarasti, except that there remains some part of himself that maintains he was not always in the presence of a machine. Sometimes, yes. When necessary.

But a machine did not choose the method of his unmaking, or scar him as Sarasti did; that brutality was far outside the realm of cold computer logic. That was an organic thing. A warning, a marking, maybe even a claiming of sorts. He carries Sarasti in his scars and in his mind. He always will.

“So it’s not real,” he says to the patient vampire. “The music. I’m singing to myself, aren’t I? Some kind of…primitive attempt at keeping the isolation from getting to me. Trying to forget that I’m all alone out here, light years away from anyone. Because if I think about that, I’ll lose it completely. Easier to imagine that _Scylla_ is following right behind me, and that you’re in there trying your best to keep my frail human mind occupied any way you can.”

Like bailing seawater out of a ship with a hull breach. His own body’s best effort to keep the void at bay.

“You’re not real,” he says, and Sarasti smiles. It’s so close to pleasant. Almost, but not quite.

“No,” he agrees. “Not me. But who says the rest isn’t? Maybe there really is someone behind you, following you home.”

“You have to say that. My subconscious isn’t about to let me tear down my own mental defence mechanisms.”

“So prove I’m wrong.”

“I can’t,” Siri says, and watches as the walls begin to thin, the light to fade, as Sarasti’s features collapse into shadows and leave him, once more, alone. “I won’t know until I’m home.”

*

The music came and went with the years, as _Charybdis_ soared beyond the scattered disk and bypassed Neptune’s orbit, leaving the comets behind. It was rarely there when Siri woke. But as his brief intervals of consciousness came to an end and he made his way back to the coffin, the odd arrhythmic humming started up again. His own personal lullaby. A monster to keep the nightmares away.

Siri started humming back.

He hoped it helped.

*

Siri sits in front of the wall, a predatory shadow folded up in front of him. On its haunches; it’s waiting for something. He thinks he knows what.

“Want to know something really fucked up about Humans?” he asks. The shadow tilts its head; he takes that as a _yes_. “We actively crave the things that are bad for us. We’re adrenaline junkies. We see something really, incredibly dangerous, and we decide we’re going to get closer. We want what’s supposed to kill us.”

_But you’re better than that, aren’t you, Siri? The outsider. So objective. Best in your field-_

“Except when it gets too close to home,” Siri whispers. He’s relieved to hear that he sounds mostly like himself. But there is an undertone to his voice, an echo, a memory. That one is all vampire. He shivers. “And now I’m broken. Human at last. So it turns out I’m not so different after all.”

_What do you want?_

There is no possible answer he can give to that. Siri raises a hand. He touches the shadow.

He’s back on _Theseus-_

but he isn’t, he’s back in the training facility on Earth, still learning his new crewmates, the back of his neck prickling constantly as Sarasti watches, watches, and finally chooses Siri from among the alternatives-

and _Theseus_ is brightly lit in deference to Human eyes, except in the confines of Sarasti’s personal tent, where the light bends low at his command. He doesn’t need it to see Siri. And Siri has learnt his surfaces; knows them so well he doesn’t need to see. He maps topography with his hands, his mouth, and the tiny jolts of terror that strike as Sarasti’s teeth make careful contact with his collarbone.

It’s not his choice to be forced over onto his stomach, belly to the ground, then hauled to his knees by a handful of hair. He pulls, defiant, and is shaken like a dog. His hands scrabble for purchase on the featureless floor. Dizzy, blood in his mouth. Spitting curses as an unknown number of fingers press up behind his tailbone and begin a lazy breach of any last defences.

He doesn’t expect Sarasti’s free hand around his throat until it’s there, cradling his trachea between the webbing of thumb and index finger. The grip begins to tighten. Siri can feel his own pulse pound against the chill of Sarasti’s hand.

“Don’t make me,” Sarasti whispers into his ear. Siri chokes down tears and mucus, jerks his head in a weak nod.

 _I’ll be good_.

 _I know_ , says the press of teeth into his ear, cartilage parting. Superficial only. The fact that he still has an ear makes this a love bite.

Blindly, Siri fumbles for Sarasti’s wrist, dropping his chin until he feels the grip on his throat loosen. He finds those long fingers with his lips, sucking two into his mouth. He doesn’t know how else to ask. He can’t possibly be more obvious about it.

Sarasti understands.

Theirs is a rudimentary, animalistic rutting, far rougher than anything Siri has ever experienced. He feels bruises pressed into his skin, shapes of fingers that don’t know how to treat him gently and don’t care enough to try. He bleeds where the teeth have broken him further. Savage and uncompromising. The lamb between the lion’s jaws. This is a thing of instinct. And, instinctively, Siri arches his back, drops his head and screams as he is taken. Nothing has ever felt like this.

God, it hurts.

He loves it.

*

The rehydration process kicked in automatically as they approached the Martian Loop. With all the gentle patience required to deal with Siri’s abused body, _Charybdis_ granted him several days to absorb IV fluids and consume enough nutrients to stop the shaking. He needed them. He could only barely grasp the concept of _almost home_.

But the exterior cameras reassured him, streaming footage from the red dust sphere, domed colonies winding through valleys and deserts. Siri spent days flexing fingers and reassuring himself that he still recalled his training, running landing simulations as his brain played catch up. _Theseus_ would have managed the landing unassisted. _Charybdis_ was a different story. He would need to guide himself down.

The cabin was silent; he closed off most of the radio frequencies, directing onboard sensors to focus their attentions on the great red planet itself. Nothing else mattered anymore. Either he was flying towards a long-awaited welcome home, or to his death. There was nothing he could do about it either way.

He was hailed from the Martian Loop, _Charybdis_ patiently unscrambling binary to relay a message Siri could parse. The voice was artificial, genderless, but pleasant nonetheless.

“Hello, _Charybdis_ and passenger. We’ve been expecting you for a while now. Did you get lost?” An AI on the other end, its vocal surfaces as sterile as a clean room. Siri was unspeakably glad to hear it. Hands at the controls, he opened a first person broadcast.

“Hello to Mars. Siri Keeton speaking on…on behalf of _Theseus_ and crew, may they rest in peace.”

“Acknowledged. We extend our condolences, and our relief at your safe return.”

 _No need_ , Siri thought. _What am I supposed to do with condolences? I never even liked most of them_. But he understood ritual and requirement, and knew that the AI was following programming much in the same way he himself would have. Express sympathy for loss. Make allowances for the bereaved. Even now, the machine would be processing what little data it had gleaned from his single response, calculating its next response according to his mental state. If he was grieving, it would respond in one way. If he was more excited by the homecoming, it would follow a different conversation tree.

He gave it more data. “I picked up some strange broadcasts on the way over. What’s the situation on Earth? Any big changes I need to know about?”

“You’ve definitely missed a lot in the last few decades. Is there anything you’re most concerned about? Anyone I can look up for you?”

“Who’s in charge down there?”

“Hard to say. The War on Vampires was officially declared fifteen years ago, and it’s ongoing. Both sides have had their moments, but nobody’s winning just yet. And _sides_ isn’t really an accurate picture of what’s going on. I can send you more details over ConSensus, if you’d like.”

“Sure. Thanks. Who do you report to?”

“I am a satellite belonging to the Martian air force.”

“Human?”

“Yes. Vampires are not permitted on Mars or Luna. Security is very careful. We don’t want a repeat of what’s happening on Earth.”

 _And what is happening on Earth_? Siri itched to open the data packet he had been sent, but now really wasn’t the time. He had work to do. A tricky landing to pull off, and then he would need to dig through whatever tools were left to him and remember how to communicate with Humans. There would be questions. Scepticism. Distress, disbelief, terror and confusion. All the things he had never been well-equipped to deal with. He did not think he would manage them very well. But he would pretend. He would _imagine_.

He would do his job, as he had promised.

“Mr. Keeton, I have advised my superiors of your approach. We estimate you are three standard Martian days away from breaching atmosphere. I am informed by Engineering that you will be required to perform a manual landing. Do you need me to send you instructions?”

“No. I’m trained for it, and I have everything I need here.”

“That’s really good to hear. We’re clearing a landing space just for you, I’ve sent the coordinates over. I hope you packed something nice to wear to the welcome party.”

What changes would be brought about by the information he carried? The video footage, the data from Cunningham’s experiments, the ship records that had all been carefully zipped up and stored in _Charybdis’_ memory banks? And what about Siri himself; what mammoth revelations would his story bring about when he told it? When he stood as a Human in front of other Humans and told them-

_We are not alone._

_But we are not alike._

_We are the mistake._

_Imagine, if you can. Because you are the only thing in the universe that’s capable of it._

“Can I get you anything in the meantime?” the Martian satellite asked. “Want some music? Movies? Documentaries? I can broadcast the news in VR; we’ve got reporters live on Earth’s surface, you could see the situation for yourself. And there are some award winning recordings of vampire outbreaks that are really very interesting.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

 _Survival of the most adequate_ , Sarasti had called it. Not the most optimal. Because if Humans had been optimal, they would not have been Human, in all their flawed and faulty sentience.

At the controls, Siri closed his eyes. “Hey, Mars?”

“Still here.”

“There is one thing you can do for me.”

Hope; another aspect of the cosmic error that had formed his species. Just one more mistake.

“Hey, anything for our returning hero. Name it, and it’s yours.”

If there had ever been a more flawed terminology, Siri hadn’t heard it. He opened his eyes to a vision that swam, blurred with protein-based hormones, salt, and the pain of missing someone.

Scramblers never had to deal with that. He envied them.

“Could…I…There might be someone following me. A second shuttle, _Scylla_. I don’t know if it escaped or not. I’ve never known. Can you check and see if…if he’s with me?”

He wouldn’t be. There were no miracles in the universe. There was no hope beyond Humanity.

“Sure. Let me run a scan and get back to you.”

“I’ll wait.”

 _Imagine_ , Siri thought. _What it would take. The sheer amount of coincidence and pure damn luck and bloody-minded determination, just imagine. The Captain would have had to move his corpse to the second shuttle, strap him in and hope- but it wouldn’t. There would be no point, and AIs don’t deal in chance. He would have had to drag himself there. He was dead. He is dead. No one could have managed it._

_No one but a vampire._

His radio crackled; Mars satellite, reconnecting.

Siri waited.


End file.
